Dear Mom and Dad

Starred review from November 1, 2023
The daughter of Ronald and Nancy Reagan offers an intimate glimpse into the life she shared with her two iconic parents. In this deeply personal epistolary memoir, Davis, the author of The Long Goodbye and Angels Don't Die, examines the "private reality" behind the couple's public image that only she knew as their rebellious first-born daughter. The tone in which she addresses her parents is as loving as it is forgiving. Yet the author still continues her search for "truths" to help her understand the "distance and dissonance in our family." Her earliest memories are happy ones that included "laughter and warmth," even from the mother who made Davis the target of her "formidable" rages and kept the author's brother, Ron, from associating with her when they grew older. The author writes warmly about the father who taught her how to ride horses and ignore bullies, but also loved America enough to make Davis feel "a bad case of sibling rivalry with this country." Distanced from her father by his ambitions (and later, the conservatism of his beliefs) and victimized by her mother, Davis became a woman whose own anger "ruined romantic relationships, turned me down wrong paths, blinded me." A desire to understand her parents' secret griefs--e.g., the maternal abandonment that scarred her mother and paternal alcoholism that disrupted her father's childhood--eventually brought Davis closer to understanding her parents. But it was her father's Alzheimer's disease that ultimately helped her make a separate peace with both "Mom and Dad" and own the "broken pieces" of her family. Humane, elegiac, and wise, this book moves smoothly through its portrait of a complicated family and of the daughter who learned the lessons of patient acceptance that family had to offer. A fully candid and profoundly moving memoir.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

January 1, 2024

Davis, the 71-year-old daughter of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, pens a healing letter to her late parents. She attempts to look differently at the dysfunctional life they lived together. Her reflections show she believed that her mother was always displeased with her, and later, that her parents were an "island of two," who would have been fine together without her or her younger brother, Ron. But early home movies and walks in her childhood California neighborhood stir up loving memories. She acknowledges that her father's inattentiveness could have been modeled on his father. She also understands that her mother felt abandoned by her own mother. Davis also shares her discoveries and reflections of her father's loss of his infant daughter with his previous wife, actress Jane Wyman; the 1981 attempted assassination; her thoughts on of some of his political views and his mishandling of the AIDS crisis; his Alzheimer's disease; and her regret about writing an earlier tell-all memoir. VERDICT This book about Davis's relationship with her parents, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, unpacks a lot. Her eloquent writing and reassessment of her family bonds will keep readers intrigued.--Denise Miller

Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 15, 2024
Davis (The Long Goodbye) reflects on her troubled relationships with her parents, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, in this slim yet sturdy memoir. Written entirely in the second person, the loose chronology traces Davis’s regret-filled recognition that “the circle” of her parents’ “own private world” left no room for her. Before he was governor of California and president of the United States, Ronald Reagan was the affable host of TV’s General Electric Theater. Davis’s early memories, though happy, usher in the lifelong specter of his celebrity: “Whether or not a family is famous, there exists a public perception and a private reality.... In our case, the whole world was looking in.” Later, Davis’s politics diverged from her parents’ and the family grew estranged. “In his play Angels in America, Tony Kushner writes, ‘The Reagans only speak to each other through their agents.’ Not completely true, but close enough,” Davis acknowledges. Attempts to rehabilitate her father’s political legacy by contrasting his personal beliefs with the policies of the contemporary Republican Party, as when she invokes John Hinckley’s attempted assassination of Reagan to wonder what her father “would think of the AR-15s, now brazenly legal, that are being used to slaughter innocent people,” can feel like overreach, but Davis excels when focusing more tightly on the peculiarities of being the adult daughter of American royalty. Marked by unwaveringly strong prose and genuine candor, this delivers.

Starred review from January 1, 2024
In this thoughtful memoir, Davis directly addresses her parents, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, pulling up remembered moments and trying to puzzle out their significance from the vantage points of hindsight and maturity (Davis is now 70 years old). Themes revolve around the special bond Davis felt with her father and the basic decency he manifested even after his post-presidency Alzheimer's diagnosis, along with the author's battles with her mother, tempered by analyses of Nancy's own dysfunctional background. Davis' ongoing political activism, she realizes, is based on deeply held beliefs and was never just a knee-jerk reaction intended to create bad press. The Reagans turned child-rearing responsibilities over to strangers despite the happy home movies and publicity campaigns meant to portray otherwise. Now Davis wonders what her parents would think about current realities: she and her surviving siblings basically estranged from each other, their old neighborhood supplanted by mega-mansions, and the utter lack of civility in present-day politics. This deeply personal account plays out over momentous twentieth-century events and offers insights into what it meant to be the child of Hollywood and Washington icons. Considering the presidential election year, expect lots of publicity and demand.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.